Configuration. Who wants it? Not me!
Eleventy is great. Jekyll is great. All the static-site-generators are great.
I don’t want to configure them. I don’t want to maintain the configuration of them. I don’t want to upgrade them over time.
I do want to control my own little system from end-to-end.
Call it procrastination. Call it having fun. At the end of the day, I know my sensibilities. I don’t want dependencies. I want a feature-light, do-it-yourself website.
So that’s what I’m building.
My static site generator is a Rakefile. It mostly invokes pandoc to transform Markdown into HTML. RSS::Maker.make builds the RSS feed. One special task generates the index page. A little bit of Ruby glues it all together.
No Gemfile.
No package.json.
There’s two dependencies.
The Ruby standard library and pandoc.
I’m optimistic that I can replace pandoc with RDoc::Markdown and ERB templates.
Maybe—someday—if the pandoc dependency proves too heavy.
It’s not much.
I like it.
And I’ll sleep easy knowing that I’ll never have to run bundle update or npm update again.
Published: 2022-07-11